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Grendel Drago writes: "Donald E. Knuth has released "Pre-Fascicle 2b: Generating all permutations" from TAOCP Volume 4. It will be section 7.2.1.2 of the final work. Oh, and Volume 4 may now fill *four* subvolumes. Send in bugs, get checks for $2.56, tell the grandkids."

Any programmer worth his salt has at least thumbed through the Knuth books. The set is one of half a dozen things I'd want to see on every programmer's bookshelf, and possibly even at the top of that list.

Knuth's getting on in years. Let's all pray/hope/whatever that he makes it through the remaining volumes. If not, it'll be a major loss.

I actually don't have these books on my bookshelf right now, but at various times in the past the copies from the library have been there. Does that count?:-)

I have to second the statement that these are the BEST computer science books available. They were written a long time ago and it is a bit humbling to realize that nearly all of the programming algorithms we use now were figured out by that time. These books are written in an entertaining manner, and they have clear explanations of everything. They are not beginner's books and they don't shy away from the math. I suspect that 100 years from now people will still be reading these books in the same way that English majors still read Shakespeare.

Amen. 'Name the damn [sic] SQL dolphin' gets a front page spot and ~350 comments while Knuth languishes in the back with what, twelve? I haven't questioned slashdot through all the reposts and poorly researched posts, but this is getting ridiculous. If this keeps up, slashdot will become the 'Entertainment Tonight' of the tech community.

You're thinking of bugs in TeX and METAFONT. Those are currently worth $327.68 apiece, and (I think) will continue to occasionally double so long as Knuth is alive. (Beyond that, any bug is classified as a feature.) Bugs in the books have always been worth $2.56.

"Donald E. Knuth has released "Pre-Fascicle 2b: Generating all permutations" from TAOCP Volume 4. It will be section 7.2.1.2 of the final work. Oh, and Volume 4 may now fill *four* subvolumes. Send in bugs, get checks for $2.56, tell the grandkids."

Michael, if I said this to my grandkids they would throw me in the insane asylum for spewing gibberish.

That sentance makes *zero* sense to neophytes, and I doubt it makes sense to experienced *phytes in the industry you are talking about (What industry are you talking about? Programming? Cryptology? DNA sequencing?).

Who is Donald Knuth anyways? Wasn't he the head Animator behind the "Secrets of Nimh" cartoon & the "Dragon's Lair" & "Space Quest" video games?

Anyway, any professional programmer who can't identify Knuth (because of TAOCP or TeX), or at the least hasn't heard anecdotes of Knuth's infamous $2.56 reward for finding bugs in TeX and mistakes in his textbooks, ought to be shot.

Duh! Let's face it, most of the folks here aren't even sysadmins, they're wannabe sysadmins. Installing a Linux distro at home on a x86 and even networking your house with it doesn't make you a real (good) sysadmin. It's a great learning experience, but that's about it.

As far as the math goes, most programmers I've met aren't real strong in math. But then, most of the programmers I know do (and most of the programming I do) straight-up business applications. If there's any math in there, it usually gets handed to you by an accountant/actuary/whomever with about a ream of documentation. That's just the reality of it for math skills. It's much more important that I be able to manage very complex systems and keep my soft skills strong. Those I use every day.

Dude, I'm going to have to take the blame for that one. You'll notice that that text was italicized, and hence came from my submission.

Send in bugs, get checks for $2.56, tell the grandkids.

Let's expand this a bit. Don Knuth sends $2.56 (a ``hexadecimal dollar'') for each bug so found. This money is sent in check form. No one in their right mind would actually cash them, especially since Knuth is getting on in years. (Note that he's just celebrated his millionth birthday---in base 2, of course.) I have two checks from Knuth (though for ``useful suggestions'', worth but thirty-two cents apiece), and they are possibly my most prized possessions.

And that's ``Don Bluth''. Not ``Don Knuth''. Though they're both rather devout men, that's where the similarities end, unless Don Bluth plays the organ...

I found the news just above the 2b announcement to be a bit more interesting.

Evidently the random number generator ran_array / RNARRAY from Volume 2 had some problems. As I read it, if one seed is used many times, it would produce numbers that passed randomness tests; but one user tried many different seeds for only a few generations - which began to fail randomness tests.

The remarkable thing Knuth noted was that two different methods of fixing it were found by Richard Brent. The first was to discard the first 2000 numbers; the other was just basic improvement of the initialization of the algorithm.

I'm very curious as to why this is; my understanding of seminumerical theory is limited to what I've read in Knuth, but I'm still very interested in the causes of this problem.

Richard M. Stallman has requested that this post be renamed "GNUth Releases Part of Volume 4" and that the book be referred to as "GNUth's 'The Art of Computer Programming'". Says RMS, "Clearly this system of many eyes viewing the pre-releases to remove bugs reflects a major benefit of open source. To say anything but 'GNUth' would be to ignore this fact."